An 'unplanned trilogy dedicated to my own generation of youth and its sacrifice in the last war' is Andrzej Wajda's own description of the three films which have made him the best-known Polish director: A Generation, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds. The last film of the trilogy will always be remembered for the character of Maciek, the young assassin, played by the late Zbigniew Cybulski, who has come to be, like James Dean, one of the key figures in the cinema mythology of the past two decades.

A Generation was the first film of the trilogy to be made, in 1954; the generation in question is the idealistic communist youth movement which bravely carried out a campaign of sabotage against the German occupiers of Poland. This is the simplest and most hopeful film of the three, though tragedy is there, as Stach, a teenage boy, sees his comrades in one of the underground groups die for the cause. Kanal (1957) is altogether more bitter and pessimistic, in its dramatic portrayal of the fate of a group of Polish resistance fighters who are driven into the Warsaw sewers in the course of a desperate retreat to the centre of the city during the Rising of 1944. It was, however, Ashes and Diamonds (1958) which brought Wajda international acclaim. It is set in a small town in Poland at the end of the Second World War, where two members of a right-wing underground movement have been sent to assassinate an important Communist official. The film ends tragically, with victory for the opportunists and the destruction of the idealists in both political camps.